Prince of Heart Attacks
by LZ0291
Summary: A Genderflipped/Post-Game story. Not much makes Major Adele Steiner feel old. Apart from the antics of the Crown Prince, and how Queen Zida reacts to finding her son swinging off chandeliers...


Adele Steiner was only thirty-seven. It was not old. It was not exactly young any more, but Adele had spent her younger days performing a vital duty, and continued that duty. But even in her twenties she had all but sworn that someone, probably her now-husband General Benedict, would have to force her to retire some day when she was in her sixties. She had always simply felt she was growing stronger and healthier with age.

She was willing to admit some of it was perhaps hubris. She knew she wasn't quite as fast a runner now as she had been ten years before, and sometimes she ached a little bit more than she once had after a long day. But for a lifelong soldier who had always maintained her fitness, even after giving birth to twins, she knew she was probably in better physical condition than women half her age. For a mother of two energetic but well-behaved eighteen-month-olds, she did not have the stressful early motherhood that many other women suffered. Including her own mother, if she was honest. There was not much that made her feel old.

Except, it seemed, the antics of the three year old Crown Prince. For it seemed that Prince Bahrne managed to give her grey hairs and chest pains every time she ran into him away from his parents or nannies.

Today, he'd somehow got into the Great Hall. Into the rafters. Into the chandeliers. And he had very much taken after his mother, rather than the grandfather he was named for, who had been a rather lazy and overweight individual. The little blond ball of energy was using his tail to throw himself between them.

Adele found herself stunned, frozen to the spot as if she'd met the gaze of a basilisk. The only way she knew she was not stone was that her heart was trying to explode with horror at what she saw.

_The Crown Prince, the Heir to the Throne, the most precious person in all Alexandria Castle_ (at least while Benedict and the twins were at home, a interruptingly pedantic little off-topic voice reminded her) _was swinging around by only his tail at least thirty feet off the ground. The very solid, very hard, very much likely to kill a falling Crown Prince ground_

Not much could make Adele Steiner scream. That which could generally brought on a form of terror that just turned it into a strangled gasp, which was what she eventually managed to do.

"Hrk!"

"Hey, Steiner, is something wrong?" A voice asked from behind her.

She turned, and found herself unable to reply properly to the Queen, Zida Tribal-Alexandros, former thief.

"Thprnce... Chandeliers... Hrk!" She managed.

The Queen raised an eyebrow and looked into the room.

"Huh? What do you mea- BAHRNE VIVI BENEDICT TIL ALEXANDEROS, GET DOWN FROM THERE THIS INSTANT, THOSE CHANDELIERS ARE PRICELESS!"

"Aw, but Mother..."

"No 'buts', young man, you know the rules!"

The Queen marched to below where her petulant son was now hanging. She held out her arms and the moody prince dropped down into them as Adele had another heart attack.

"HRK!"

"We have told you a thousand times, Your pain-in-the-bottomness, if you must swing from chandeliers, swing from the cheap ones!" Queen Zida fumed.

Adele's brain caught up with this.

"Swing from... _the cheap ones?!_"

"Well, yes, Adele, even I know how much these ones are worth!" Zida smiled, as the prince pouted in her arms.

"B-but, what if he fell?!"

"He'd bounce."

"But it's over thirty feet!"

"He'd bounce, he does it all the time."

"He does..." Steiner managed to gasp out before she felt light-headed.

Major Adele Steiner did not feel old. But as she fainted, not for the first time thanks to the Prince, she was seriously reconsidering her youthful boast of needing to be forced to retire in her sixties. Quitting in her late thirties was starting to sound really good right about now...

...And perhaps the floor was slightly softer than she'd given it credit, but still...


End file.
